An AASL Highlight

Last week, the 2011 AASL conference (American Association of School Librarians) came to Minneapolis.What a crazy week it was! I worked at the Capstone booth the last day of the show during our book giveaway, and oh my, librarians really love our books — the line was roughly 150 people long!

But the real highlight for me was meeting the author of the Kylie Jean books, Marci Peschke. She came up from Texas for the show, and it's always so fun to meet the author of a series that I've worked on. I love to hear about their process and find out more details about the books (like there really is a Kylie Jean and a dog named Ugly Brother!). Check out Marci's jean jacket and pink cowboy boots. Aren't they fabulous?! So nice to meet you, Marci!

Fiction Friday: The kid becomes the adult, the adult becomes the child.

I heard a concept that was foreign to me last week while watching a training video. It said that opposed to what many people believe, our own traits as children stay with us forever. That each trait is something that we’ll never grow out of and is so engrained to our personality that it only gets stronger with age. The video explained that deep inside we feel the same way we did when we were kids and if anything, it makes you more passionate about what you do, about your “super powers” as I call them, or “strengths” as everybody else does.

That thought brought me back to my childhood. I was an introvert, but yet I loved to tell stories and draw them out. I wanted to be able to tell the story more accurately to help other people get it. When I grew bigger, I started talking to my friends about what I’d dreamed the night before. I would paint scenes and color with pencils for hours, softly so there wouldn’t be any lines on the paper. I didn’t wanted people to get distracted by the lines, but to take the scene fully in. Then at age 17 I started to write. I had a stack of white paper under my bed and I would turn my light on right after my parents went to bed. My pages were fully handwritten, and my friends would borrow them to read the next day so that we could decide where the story was going from there on.

That was me as a kid and now that I think of it, that’s exactly me now. This year I got an amazing opportunity. I’m an art director, so my responsibility is the look and feel of the books, but yet, one of the people I look up to when it comes to writing, asked me if I would co-write something with her. 

Beth and I came up with a super cool concept while having tea in our afternoon break. A hi-low series for girls. A story about two best friends, girls who are opposites. They fight over a boy, and one wishes the other away. We hammered out all of the details over cups of tea and coffee. And that is how Fairieground was born 9 months ago. 

Beth and I have been writing, editing, art directing and designing these books together. They have some of the best parts of both of us mixed and entwined together for kids to enjoy for years to come.

Here is the cover of one of the four books, all illustrated by Odessa Sawyer. Sincerely, I would say childhood and adulthood have gone full circle. What is your story?

A Visit From the Author of Katie Woo!

Me (Emily) on the left and the Fabulous Fran on the right.

Last week I had the great pleasure of meeting Fran Manushkin, the author of the wonderful Katie Woo books! I wish we could have spent more time together, because she has so many fascinating stories to share. We (or at least I), don't get to meet the authors and illustrators behind our books very often, but when we do, it's such a treat! Actually meeting and talking with the person who comes up with the stories or creates the illustrations enriches my experience as a book designer, it makes the words and pictures even more meaningful to me. That's also why, in the cases when I don't get to meet them in person, that I always appreciate the "about the author/illustrator" in the backs of our books. It helps me gain a new level of understanding about the story and I like to see what may have influenced them to write it in the first place.

Now we just need to convince Tammie Lyon, the illustrator, to pay us a visit!